A Painter's Studio, Louis-Léopold Boilly, c. 1800

But how does the artist secure himself against the corruptions of his time, which everywhere encircle him? By disdaining its opinion. Let him look upwards to his own dignity and to Law, not downwards to fortune and to everyday needs.

It is common to say that philosophy is about three things: the true, the good, and the beautiful. We've sampled widely across philosophy, but most of our reading has been about the good, because we are looking for practical advice on how to live. Modern academic philosophy, by contrast, is mostly about the true, because you can endlessly turn out answers to “how do we know what we know?” and academics need jobs, after all.

Beauty, however, is the most neglected of the trio. Maybe because it's easy to dismiss as an unnecessary luxury, something we should give up for the sake of some other worthy goal. Maybe because of the slippery task of trying to define what it is and the subsequent escape into subjectivity. You've heard all that noise about the “eye of the beholder”, “that's YOUR opinion”, “one man's trash” and so forth.

But let's not give the bromides too much credit. One man that definitely didn't was the 18th century German Friedrich Schiller, who wrote On the Aesthetic Education of Man (sometimes rendered in English as Aesthetical Letters or several similar variations), a work that respects Beauty as at least equal to her sisters Truth and Goodness. Shocked by the descent of the French Revolution, which seemed to begin with high-minded ideals, into blood and madness, Schiller asks: how could this have been avoided? If political revolution doesn't work, what conditions are necessary to really produce human flourishing?

I keep hearing “emergent situation” or similar phrases used in place of “emergency”. This is incorrect; “emergent” means something like “coming into existence” or “coming into view” and does not, by itself, imply urgency or crisis. Although before taking to my blog in anger I had only heard this usage rather than seen it in print, a quick visit to the search engines reveals the poisonous weed taking root in (where else?) the offices of state bureaucrats and educationists. In the New Jersey Administrative Code, Chapter 53B (Jursidictional Assignments for Railroad Overhead Bridges), we find the phrase explicitly defined thus:

"Emergent situation" means a sudden, urgent, or unexpected occurrence or occasion that interferes with the free and safe movement of traffic over a railroad overhead bridge, which requires immediate action.

This same production informs us also of the possibility of “emergent bridge repairs”, whatever that means. Are the repairs emerging in some way? Is the bridge?

New video! I rescue this X-Carve CNC router by tearing it down, cleaning it up, putting it back together, and building a "torsion box" tabletop for it to live on. Part 1 of a series!

Frederick Douglass, Andrew & Ives, 1863

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

In this, the first of his three (!) autobiographies, Douglass tells the tale of his early years in captivity and of his escape to freedom in the northern states, an escape facilitated by his identification of the power of language and of the written word. Forbidden to learn how to read and write, he taught himself by any means necessary, from the surreptitious to the psychological:

“when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be, "I don't believe you. Let me see you try it." I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing”

Douglass was a slave at birth, illiterate until 12, a free man at 20, an author at 27, and an international figure soon after that. By the end of his life he had been a diplomat, a publisher, a real estate developer, the most famous man of his race in the world, and “the 19th century's most photographed American”. If that isn't self improvement I don't know what is!

Unlike some of our other selections, The Narrative isn't necessarily practical advice from our point of view; we all know how to read and came by it easily. Nobody in this club is likely to have to escape from slavery, or to be whipped for mere clumsiness. But this book gives us something else: inspiration, and with it maybe even a motivating dose of shame. After all, will any of our excuses stand up to the scrutiny of a boy that had to bribe other children with stolen bread for reading lessons?

That should give us all something to think about!

We will reconvene at 7PM on September 8 at Vino's, as usual. See you there!

The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine. Sanford Robinson Gifford, 1864–1865

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Here's something fun for a change: Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Self Reliance” (note the quotation marks around the title, this one is short). Many of our selections demand much of us, and by that I'm referring to more than the page count. Consider Nietzsche: “Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths...” Consider Marcus: “Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness”. Consider Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” But Emerson offers you something you want to believe:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so

As you can see, Emerson has no time for false humility. He wants to see you escape conformity, cast off any expectations that are holding you back, and become exactly yourself, acting and creating as only you can. Heady stuff, and although it's suspiciously easy to hear, it has the virtue of being not very easy to do; the voices in our heads of, well, everyone but ourselves are no quieter now than they were in Emerson's day, and after all, OSSI's membership are mostly well-behaved adults. So we'll risk it.

Here's the full text: Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you'd like to read it in print, it's often collected with his other essays, or in collections of transcendentalist works alongside Thoreau, etc. Any of these should do just fine.

We will meet as usual at Vino's, on August 11, and “thank the joyful juice for all [we] know”. See you there!